All Articles Tagged "Mowry"
Lettuce Diets and Weight Watchers? These New Moms Need to Stop

Move over Jennifer Hudson! Jessica Simpson is the new celebrity spokeswoman for Weight Watchers.
Why Jessica Simpson? Because God forbid a new mother’s first order of business be to bond with her baby. She has weight to lose and fast!
It’s terrible the amount of pressure placed on celebrity mothers and, by extension, non-celebrity mothers to lose baby weight as quickly as possible as soon as they leave the hospital.
Worse, are the celebrities that face the pressure themselves and then turn around and cover magazines promoting their weight loss as an even prouder moment than birthing a healthy baby.
Even “Queen Bey” has completely fed into this nonsense. She made headlines after telling her fans at a concert that she lost 60 pounds in five months by running on a treadmill and eating lettuce. I hope she was only kidding because that is ridiculous, especially since she is (or was?) breastfeeding.
New mom, actress and author Tia Mowry says that she was encouraged to seek surgery to help her lose her baby weight. At a book signing in DC, she told BellyItchBlog.
“Money was being thrown at me to do surgeries and I said no, ‘I want to do it the right way’ because I know there are moms out there who can relate.
“I lost 5 lbs a month which is what your OB/GYN suggest you to do, I would work out 3 times out of the week because moms, who are working moms, who want to spend time with their baby, don’t have time to be in the gym 2 hours a day.”
And why should they? It’s one thing if a person had a baby a decade ago and is still calling the extra poundage “post-baby weight”, but we really need to give these brand new moms a break.
Studies have shown that most mothers return to their pre-pregnancy weight just a year after giving birth. So why glorify someone who has dropped the weight in five weeks as though that is something to be proud of and aspire toward? It’s unrealistic at best and dangerous at worst.
Granted, there are some things that newly pregnant women try to do while expecting to prevent a colossal amount of weight gain and that definitely helps them bounce back quickly. This is how Victoria’s Secret model Miranda Kerr was able to walk in that famous fashion show last year just months after giving birth. However, if a pregnant woman piled on 75 pounds in ten months then it will (and should) take longer than ten weeks to strip it off.
Women have enough body image issues and pressures as it is. It’s not fair that a new mom should be subject to intense scrutiny and cruel insults (like the comments directed toward The Help‘s Bryce Dallas Howard and former Miss World Aishwarya Rai Bachchan) simply because they aren’t working overtime at the gym immediately after pushing a human being out of their uterus.
The expectation to make the weight evaporate seems standard because there aren’t enough celebrities, like Tia Mowry, who say publicly that taking care of their baby and their body is much more important than wriggling into a bikini in record time.
Instead, Jessica Simpson accepting the Weight Watcher’s advertising gig and Beyonce announcing her lettuce diet are prime examples of celebrity moms that insist on being part of the ever-growing problem that is expecting women to be walking around in ever-shrinking bodies and, quite frankly, it’s sad.
Do you think new Hollywood mothers are taking their post-baby weight loss too far?
Alissa Henry is a freelance writer living in Columbus, OH. Follow her on Twitter @AlissaInPink or check out her blog: This Cannot Be My Life
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